What Does 2 Kings 3:27 Mean in the King James?
Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel: and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The Hebrew uses the root “ascend” for both the act of offering the son and the burnt offering itself, making the verse’s violence audible inside its ritual language.
THE MEANING
The verse holds before the reader an heir consumed in his father’s offering and Israel facing great indignation and retreat. It leaves the human cost and the political rupture side by side, without turning the death into metaphor.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that sacrificial language makes the victim disappear: he remains the king’s son and heir in the sentence, even as the rite names him as an offering.
THE ROOT
וַיַּעֲלֵהוּ עֹלָה
wayyaʿalēhû ʿōlāh
GROWS FROM
עלה
ʿ-l-h
Go up, ascend; in the causative form, bring or make something ascend.
“offered ... for a burnt offering” in this verse is wayyaʿalēhû ʿōlāh. Hebrew uses one root in the verb for offering the son and in the noun for the burnt offering: he makes him ascend as an ʿolah. The shared root keeps the physical act and its ritual name joined in the verse.
ALSO GROWS
ʿōlāh: Burnt offering; an offering that ascends.
עֹלָה
This is the offering named in the verse, carrying the root’s sense of ascent into the ritual term.
wayyaʿalēhû: He made him ascend; he offered him up.
וַיַּעֲלֵהוּ
This is the verb describing what the king does to his son, from the same root as the offering.
maʿălāh: Step, stair, ascent.
מַעֲלָה
This branch preserves the root’s concrete sense of upward movement, heard here in the offering’s name and action.
THE PATTERN
When scripture exposes child sacrifice, it names the sons and daughters inside the rite.
But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel.And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood.THE THREAD
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.Genesis uses the same root pairing: the verb for offering Isaac and the noun for burnt offering both grow from עלה, “ascend.” There the sacrifice is halted; here the son is offered, and the shared wording makes that difference stark.
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